Cinema

Film Noir

Atom Egoyan. Lars von Trier. Jim Jarmusch. Michelangelo Antonioni. Amazon. How to Read a Film. A Cassavetes/Rowlands Series at Metrograph. Composition In Storytelling. Hollywood's Corporate Art. Men don’t make movies.

Industries don’t make movies.
Africa. Watching violent films does make people more aggressive, study shows. Their brains were scanned as they watched a succession of shootings and street fights on day one, emotional but non-violent scenes such as people interacting during a natural disaster on day two and nothing on day three.

While watching violence the aggressive group had less activity in the orbito-frontal cortex, which controls emotion-related decision making and self-control. These subjects said they felt more more inspired and determined and less upset or nervous than their non-aggressive counterparts when watching violent instead of only emotional scenes. Their blood pressure also went down progressively while the calm groups' rose. During the final 'mind wandering' stage - when no films were shown - the aggressive participants had unusually high brain activity in a network of regions known to be active when not doing anything in particular. This suggests they have a different brain function map than their non-aggressive peers, said the researchers.
Louis Le Prince, who shot the world's first film in Leeds - BBC News. Who made the first film?

The Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison are usually credited with pioneering the moving image. However a new documentary argues that the first film was actually shot in Leeds in 1888 - but that its maker disappeared before he could claim his place in cinema history. When film producer and distributor David Wilkinson visits Hollywood or New York or Cannes, he tells his movie business contacts that he comes from the city "where film was invented".

His puzzled acquaintances figure that he does not have an American accent, so cannot come from the birthplace of Thomas Edison, and is clearly not from France, the land of the Lumieres.

Realism

WALPOLE PICTURE THEATRE, Ealing, London. Cinematograph opening in July 1912. Photograph commissioned by Bovis Ltd of their building by architect J S Beard. - 42-36683420 - Droits gérés. Film Analysis. Tarkovsky. Wes Anderson. Labour in a Single Shot. Akira Kurosawa to Ingmar Bergman: “A Human Is Not Really Capable of Creating Really Good Works Until He Reaches 80”
In July of 1988, Ingmar Bergman—retired from film—turned 70.

He had every reason to believe that his best work lay behind him. After all, he had won three Academy Awards (and the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award), two BAFTAs, seven Cannes prizes, six Golden Globes, and a host of other honors.

8mm & Super 8

Violent Femme. How Scarlett Johansson learned to become aloof from her own seductiveness.

Scarlett Johansson as the title character in Luc Besson’s Lucy Within the past twelve months, Scarlett Johansson has been an alluring and rapidly expanding artificial intelligence in Her; a seductively murderous extraterrestrial in Under the Skin; and now, in Lucy, a superintelligent, post-sexual, sometimes deadly freak of evolution.
John Waters discusses 50 years of John Waters movies, and why he refuses to go backward. Jean-Claude Carrière: 'If you want fame, don't be a screenwriter'

Link to video: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Reading this on mobile?

Click here to view. Centre for Moving Image Research. Was 12 Years a Slave the best film of the year? I hope not. 12 Years a Slave is a remarkable film and I share the widespread delight that it won recognition at the Oscars in Hollywood, especially when there was always a risk that an enjoyable bit of immoral trash like The Wolf of Wall Street might have done some business at its high-minded expense.

But best film of the year? I hope not. It's a political film with a political message for our times – slavery isn't over when there are an estimated 21 million slaves today, so Steve McQueen reminded his audience on Sunday night. But Casablanca was a very political film too, plenty are, but dialogue, plot, character made them better movies.
Movie History on Pinterest is theatermasterp on Pinterest.

Jem Cohen

Watch 12 Essential Making-of Documentaries, Feat. Eraserhead & Being John Malkovich. Did the 'Blue is the Warmest Color' Director Push Too Far?
In “Blue Is the Warmest Color,” which took home the Palme d’Or at Cannes, our brightly burning heroines first meet in a lesbian bar in Lille.

Adèle, a fifteen-year-old high-school student, has already spotted Emma, a blue-haired sparkplug, on the street, and pleasured herself to thoughts of her. When the chance at conversation arises, Adèle asks Emma, somewhat mechanically, what she does. Emma replies that she studies at the École des Beaux-Arts. “Beaux-Arts?”
We Hear the Sound of Splashing. From Trainspotting, Miramax, 1996 by Julian Hanich In this essay [1] I try to categorize the range of artistic options that filmmakers currently have at hand to evoke bodily disgust. [2] Or, to reframe this approach in a slightly different manner: If we examine the variety of disgusting scenes at the movies, how can we usefully distinguish them?

My aim is to provide a number of brushstrokes for a broader panoramic picture of disgust. I consider this essay a first step toward a poetics of cinematic disgust. [3] Now, to some readers this endeavour might sound baffling.
The Stylistic Milestones of Saul Bass. Rogerebert.com. I have heard theories that Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" catalogs the seven deadly sins, takes place on the seven hills of Rome, and involves seven nights and seven dawns, but I have never looked into them, because that would reduce the movie to a crossword puzzle.

I prefer it as an allegory, a cautionary tale of a man without a center. Fellini shot the movie in 1959 on the Via Veneto, the Roman street of nightclubs, sidewalk cafes and the parade of the night. His hero is a gossip columnist, Marcello, who chronicles "the sweet life" of fading aristocrats, second-rate movie stars, aging playboys and women of commerce.
A Personal Reflection on the Work of Abel Ferrara in Light of His New Picture (Written in the Shadow of Serge Daney) on Notebook. I used to believe, like Wenders or Godard, in the death of cinema. I accepted it as fact but never believed in it. The movies, that’s what I believed in—a dark room, shadows on a surface, a bunch of lonely people sitting down, looking up.

Westerns

David Thomson On Films: The Stunted Adulthood Of Wes Anderson. Moonrise Kingdom is set on an island, but its director Wes Anderson has always seemed like someone who insisted on a small off-shore existence. This is not uncommon in American movies, or necessarily forbidding: Josef von Sternberg lived on a glowing island where the light and its shadows fell on the face of a woman, ideally Marlene Dietrich, because Sternberg had loved her and been humiliated by her.
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse - Coppola's final speech.

The Essay Film

Ingmar Bergman. Kieslowski. Rockefeller's Melancholy on Notebook. In conjunction with La Furia Umana, Notebook is very happy to present Ted Fendt's original English translation of Luc Moullet's "Rockefeller's Melancholy," on Michelangelo Antonioni. Moullet's original French version can be found at La Furia Umana. Our special thanks to Mr. Moullet, La Furia Umana and Ted Fendt for making this possible.﻿

Above: "John D.
Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre is like all his other work and thank goodness for that. With Aki Kaurismäki's movies, as with Yasujirô Ozu's, familiarity breeds contentment.
A Walk Through Carlito’s Way. Casavettes. Kenneth Anger @ 85 on Notebook. Trailer for The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol 1,released by Fantoma in 2007.

Truffaut

‘The Act of Killing’ and Indonesian Death Squads. Steven Soderbergh - The State of Cinema Video & Transcript — SF Film Society Blog. A few months ago I was on this Jet Blue coming from New York to Burbank, and I like Jet Blue not because of the prices, but they have this terminal at JFK that’s really nice.
Stunning Behind-the-Scenes Photos Show Iconic Movies in a New Light. Why France is gearing up for a culture war with the United States. Jean-Luc Godard. Werner Herzog. Orson Welles. The Sweet Spot Video: Take a Walk on the Dark Side.

Iran. Pontecorvo's Colonel Mathieu: the paratrooper who embodied France. Science Fiction Films and American Society in the Fifties. Chapter One: Science fiction films and the political climate. WHEN the Cold War began in 1947 only two science fiction films were made in the United States that year.
Film Terms Glossary - Dictionary. Film Terms Glossary: Oftentimes, film-making terms are not clearly defined for the average person.

Nestor Almendros

9/11. The Artist. Frame Rates. CGI. The Bobby Miller. 3D. Leni Riefenstahl. Kogonada. The Cinematography of 10 Great Filmmakers Captured in Cinemagraphs. In recent years, graphic interchange format, once a throwback to the awkward early years of web design, has come into its own as an art form. Leading the way is the ever-popular cinemagraph, an enhancement on photography that typically adds subtle moving elements to the scene — wisps of blowing hair, blinking eyes, rising smoke, etc.

Although cinemagraphs first gained popularity for their use in advertising, it seems only natural that the meme has taken hold of cinema as well, capturing memorable movie stills in infinite loops of movement.
Ο Αγγελόπουλος για τα ''αργά'' πλάνα & την καταξίωση (1980)
WG Sebald: Darkness on the edge of Anglia. Verso Presents: J. Hoberman's Defining Films of the 21st Century.

VersoBooks.com. Welcome to the OFFICIAL SITE of WIM WENDERS. The Danish Poet (complete) by Torill Kove. Rupert Everett: the queen of mean. Watch: ‘135 Shots That Will Restore Your Faith in Cinema'
Nicholas Rombes: Minecrafting Realism. Waking Up at the Movies by Jana Prikryl. Supercut Film School: Q&A With Elusive, Anonymous Video Essayist kogonada. Inside the strange Hollywood scam that spread chaos across the Middle East.

Lour film of 1901, judged world's earliest ever, found at media museum. 10 Auteurs and the Typefaces They Love.

Batman

Campaign to save the Regal Cinema in Melton Mowbray. Méliès. Chris Marker. The Cinefamily. Repo Man Rides Again: Alex Cox Interviewed. Daniel Roberts: Bright Boys. We Hear the Sound of Splashing. David A. Kirby: Hulk Smash Accurate Science!
Fellini and Antonioni: Film and Friendship. Hitchcock. What is the difference between The Hobbit and the news? Not as much as there should be. Eli Evans plays chicken. Undoing the Image. Philip Seymour Hoffman.